Content Changes. Strategic Content Management Doesn’t.

Now I know that title is a little over the top, and it assumes that we have a successful management program in place to begin with. Allow me to explain.

I spoke at an event at Michigan State University. It was a wonderful event, focused on how they could take their new brand to the next level through the strategic use of content. One of the delegates came up to me and told a story that I’ve heard often within the university setting. He said, “Our biggest challenge is that we have so many different constituencies within the University – all with different ideas and goals.” Now, you might argue that universities have a bit of a special monopoly on the politics and silos thing, but this is something I see constantly with enterprises of all kinds. I responded, “Yeah, this content thing would be easy if it weren’t for all those pesky people in our way.”

But this is the point. In most instances we don’t get to pick the people we work with or determine whether they are in the right jobs or can even string a sentence together. In most cases, as practitioners, we have to make our content strategy with the team we have.

As Peter Drucker said years ago, “We’re not going to breed a new race of supermen. We will have to run our organizations with people as they are.” This is an important point. The environment in which we operate, the new technologies, the platforms, the content .. all of that is changing and will continue to change at an unprecedented pace. Human nature? Not so quickly.